GUWonder

If at all, how was the above confirmed? I would have to guess that most people who have been into the AA card churning game also have a history of having flown revenue flights on non-mileage tickets too, and probably way more on AA than the average AA account holder.

rbw5t

Do we have any more details about cancellations are happening. For folks whose accounts are locked, but not cancelled, if a flight is still showing as ticketed and confirmed, can the person fly? Of course, there is a chance the lock progresses to a full cancellation of the account right before flying, but if you’re ready to head the airport, and the flights looks ok online, will they surprise you at the airport?

Thanks for any datapoints of people being able to fly, or not, on award tickets with locked accounts.

GUWonder

Have you seen the data of all the impacted accounts and gotten a deep look into travel history of most such customers?

Do most airline-affiliated card applicants really apply for airline-affiliated cards for airlines which they've never flown before applying for the airline affiliated bank card and/or which they've flown less than the average airline program account member? I would doubt that too when it comes to AA.

richarddd

Jon, is the above close to accurate?

wrp96

At least one person has reported arriving at the airport for their return flight home (after having already flown the outbound) to discover their tickets were cancelled.

joe_miami

Because people have been listing their histories. It also makes sense that people who fly AA a lot would be less in need of miles and/or less likely to jeopardize their AA account.

GUWonder

Sure, but that's happened with some account shutdowns before too that were done for other reasons than bank card related ones. So it's to be expected that AA account shut-downs for reasons related to bank card use would at times have this kind of outcome too.

84fiero

Locked accounts are still able to fly award tickets so far, but not those with terminated accounts. The award flight cancellations seem to occur at about the same time as the termination emails being sent.

joe_miami

We’re not talking about “most” card applicants. We’re talking about a small subset of card applicants.

GUWonder

The people who publicly list or even privately share their histories may or may not be representative of all impacted and what has gone on.

People who never flew AA have probably been less in the market for AA bank cards than people who have flown AA before. Getting people to sign-up for a bank card when not having a previous affiliation or close-up awareness of a brand is a harder sell than when the brand is in your face and has been before. If you go trying to sign-up people in Michigan for a Norwegian Air-affiliated bank card, I am guessing it would be a lot harder to get as many applicants to complete the application than with some new type of Delta-affiliated bank card which the prospects have not had before. Dangling out a bank card mileage bonus of an airline you fly is an easier sell than dangling out a bank card mileage bonus for some airline you don't have locally and don't even recognize. Of course there are people who may sign up for a made-up Air Gullible card, but the plural of anecdote is not empirical.

GUWonder

I asked about "all the impacted accounts".

I asked:

"Have you seen the data of all the impacted accounts and gotten a deep look into travel history of most such customers?"

"Do most airline-affiliated card applicants really apply for airline-affiliated cards for airlines which they've never flown before applying for the airline affiliated bank card and/or which they've flown less than the average airline program account member? I would doubt that too when it comes to AA."

Asking questions to get clarity about the base of empirical knowledge -- if any -- on the account practices and histories of those impacted and not impacted by the closure doesn't add confusion or noise.

Has AA shared all the impacted account users data with you or someone you know who discussed this with you? Just curious.

joe_miami

You seem to want to have an entirely different discussion than the one here.

If there were false positives, we would have reports of them by now. So far, I’ve counted zero.

sethMCOflyer

I think this question also depends on how you define "the average member." With 67 million AA accounts it's probably 60-70% that haven't flown in the past year or have only flown a few thousand miles. So by that the average member might mean someone who takes one or two flights a year.

When you start looking into average members who also redeem award miles you're going into a different subset that probably flies at least once a month.

From the datapoints I've seen there's loads of people on the trAAin who probably fly AA very infrequently, anywhere from 0-3 times per year.

Often1

"Datapoints?"

What a group of self-selecting social media posters choose to post (whether true or not) on an anonymous board is not exactly the height of useful datapoints.

Until AA acts with clarity to clear this up for better or worse, it is unlikely to be helpful to try to reverse engineer what has happened. And, having determined what has happened, what AA will do about it.

GUWonder

It's better than nothing. It's those self-reported data-points and some kinds of confirmation of account shut-downs of sorts that have made it clear that AA accounts have been shut down for card-churning-related reasons. Knowing that is better than not knowing.

Even as someone who is at no risk of having my AA account closed due to credit card churning, it's still useful info of sorts and better than not knowing this has happened too.